Symposium | Strangers, Silk Weavers, and Citizens
From the Huguenot Museum in Rochester with tickets available via Eventbrite:
Strangers, Silk Weavers, and Citizens:
The Lives of Walloon and Huguenot Immigrants to England, 1560–1800
Huguenot Museum, Rochester, 30 September 2026
Coffee from 11am, with lectures from 11.30 until 4.30pm. Ticket prices include a buffet lunch; please let us know of any dietary requirements or allergies at least one week in advance by emailing admin@huguenotmuseum.org.
• The keynote speaker, Dr Vivienne Larminie, will consider the context of Huguenot immigration to England in the 16th and 18th centuries.
• Professor Jackie Eales will speak about new research on the Canterbury Walloon and Huguenot community, 1575–1800.
• Architect, Clive Bowley, will explore the topography of Canterbury silk weaving.
• Operations Manager Lara Dix will discuss the Museum’s collections.
• The day ends with an examination by Victoria Harley of a remarkable 18th-century silk waistcoat made by the Spitalfields designer and master weaver, James Leman.
Conference | Drawing as Knowledge
From the PMC:
Drawing as Knowledge: Practice, Theory, and History
Online and in-person, Warburg Institute, London, 16–17 September 2026
A collaboration between the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Warburg Institute, this is a conference about ‘drawing as visual thinking’ within the context of British art history, inspired by the life and work of Deanna Petherbridge (1939–2024).
This conference has been organised to coincide with a display at the Paul Mellon Centre, ‘Just on the Edge’: Exploring the Deanna Petherbridge Archive (29 July – 29 October 2026). Featuring materials from Petherbridge’s archive at the PMC, together with artworks from private collections, a key theme of the display is Petherbridge’s lifelong commitment to the medium of drawing as an active process of knowledge acquisition and formation. Delegates will be given the opportunity to view the display and hear from the curator at PMC on the evening of Wednesday, 15 September. This will be followed by two days of papers and discussion in the Warburg Institute’s Lecture Theatre.
One panel will explore drawing within the practice of a range of British artists, including its function, meaning, and relationship with other media. Another will turn to curators, the role of drawing in their collaborations, and the processes of recording and understanding collections. A number of papers grouped around the theme of ‘intersections’ will explore the interconnectedness of artistic drawing practice with other disciplines, such as mapping and writing. Other talks will be situated between art history and medical humanities, looking at the role of drawing in navigating trauma, mental illness, and bereavement. Two of the panels will range across anatomy, natural history, and empire, exploring drawing as a means of knowing, conceptualising, and mastering the world. Encompassing peoples, lands, flora, and fauna, a key focus will be drawing as a technology of both colonial governance and resistance.
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Paul Mellon Centre
5.30 Drinks Reception
Short talk from Petherbridge display curator, Hannah Jones, and opportunity to see the exhibition
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The Warburg Institute
9.30 Registration and coffee
10.00 Welcome and introduction — Kate Retford, Alixe Bovey, and Flora Dennis
10.30 Panel 1 | Artists’ Practices
• Drawing to Belong: Katerina Wilczynski’s Oxford Portraits — Eliza Goodpastures
• A Rhythm of Thrusts and Curves: Barbara Hepworth’s Drawing in the 1950s — Stephen Feeke
• ‘Straining against the Limits of the Archive’: Drawing as Reimagination — Isabel Seligman
Noon Lunch
1.15 Panel 2 | Curators’ Practices
• Drawing Sculpture in the British Museum: William Alexander, Henry Corbould, and the Ancient Marbles — Tessa Kilgarriff
• Drawing Curators: Materiality, Communication, Collaboration — Claire Wintle
• Drawing from Art: Copying, Cognition, and Visual Thinking in the Museum — Antje Southern
2.45 Tea and coffee
3.15 Panel 3 | Care
• Mimesis and Memorialisation: ‘Looking After’ in End-of-Life Drawings — Eve Ess
• Commissioned Drawing as an Encounter between Forms of Knowledge — Rose Forshall and Aimee Middlemiss
• Drawn from Experience: Co-Creating Visual Narratives of Illness, Trauma and Healing — Jenny Wright
• Drawing Loneliness and Connection from the Lived Experience of Mental Distress: Findings from a Pilot Study — Louisa Smyllie-Peters and Jo Doll
5.15 Drinks Reception
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The Warburg Institute
9.00 Arrival and registration
9.15 Panel 4 | Resisting Empire
• Drawing Against the Grain: Colonial Plans, Everyday Paper Handling, and the Production of Spatial Knowledge in Colonial Bombay — Excy Hansda
• Iconologies of Line: Visual Thinking, Medium, and Colonial Power in the Daniells’ Drawings of India — Nuno Grancho
• Counter-Cartographies of Dissent: Dhali Al Mamoon’s Drawing against the Colonial Map — Humaira Hossain
10.45 Panel 5 | Travel
• A Cat Called Beef: Exploring the Drawing Practices of British Naval Officers — Katherine Gazzard
• ‘Sketching and Journalising’: Ottoman Encounters in George Scharf’s Travel Sketchbooks — Sebastian Marshall
11.45 Lunch
1.00 Panel 6 | Natural Histories
• The Quick and the Dead: George Stubbs between Drawing and Painting — Michaela Giebelhausen
• Drawn from Nature: Illustrators as Knowledge-makers in 18th-Century British Natural History — Isobel Elstob
2.00 Tea and coffee
2.30 Panel 7 | Intersections
• Only in Drawing: Impossible Objects and the Pre-Disciplinary Sketch — Tal Horesh
• Tracing Musical Logic in the Legacy of Deanna Petherbridge’s The Primacy of Drawing — Jane Alden (online)
• Cartouches and Calligraphy: Gravelot’s Designs for London’s Writing Masters, 1737–40 — Alice Clanachan
• Property Lines: Drawing, Design, and Documentation on the 18th-Century Landed Estate — John Bonehill
4.30 Concluding remarks
Symposium | Hogarth: A Tribute to Ronald Paulson
From the Lewis Walpole Library:
Hogarth: His Art, Life, and Times — A Tribute to Ronald Paulson
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 14–16 October 2026
Organized by Cynthia Roman
Presented by the Lewis Walpole Library in collaboration with the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Library, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, this symposium celebrates the generous gift by Professor Paulson (1930–2024) of his papers together with a legacy endowment to establish a fellowship at the Lewis Walpole Library in memory of his son, Andrew Meredith Paulson.
Additional Programming
• Film screenings
• Study Room visits and gallery tours by advance sign-up
• Exhibition | Satire, Sympathy, and Social Critique: William Hogarth’s Progress Prints, on view at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (12 October 2026 — 30 May 2027)
Required registration can be completed here»
This program is made possible through the support of the Lewis Walpole Library and a generous gift of Richard Greenberg in memory of Ronald Paulson.
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William Hogarth, The Harlot Beats Hemp in Bridewell Prison, from A Harlot’s Progress, plate 4, 1732 (The Lewis Walpole Library, Gift of Richard Greenberg).
4.30 Welcome
4.45 Panel 1 | Paulson’s Hogarth
Moderator: Jill Campbell (Professor of English, Yale University)
• Zirwat Chowdhury (Assistant Professor of 18th- and 19th-Century European Art, UCLA) — Lessing’s Hogarth, Hogarth’s Paulson
• Douglas Fordham (Professor of Art History, University of Virginia) — Breaking and Remaking Hogarth’s Bristol Altarpiece
• Caroline Patey (Professore Ordinario di Letteratura Inglese, Università degli Studi, Milano) — William Hogarth, the Novel Maker
6.15 Breakout Session
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10.15 Panel 2 | Drawing
Moderator: Laurel Peterson (Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings, YCBA)
• Zoë Dostal (Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, Amherst College) — Life Models, Hemp Rope, and the Line of Beauty
• Stacey Sloboda (Paul H. Tucker Professor of Art History, University of Massachusetts, Boston) — Boys Peeping at Nature: Drawing and Modeling at the St. Martin’s Lane Academy
• Jennifer Tonkovich (Eugene and Clare Thaw Curator, Morgan Library) — The Mutable Page: Hogarth’s Drawings
2.00 Breakout Session
3.45 Breakout Session
5.00 Reception at Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library
Exhibition on view: Satire, Sympathy, and Social Critique: William Hogarth’s Progress Prints
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10.15 Panel 3 | Nation and Empire
Moderator: Tim Barringer (Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University)
• Holly Shaffer (Associate Professor of Art and Architecture, Brown University) — The Two Tastes: Food and Art in Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty
• Pierre Von-Ow (Associate Lecturer in Early Modern Art History, University of St. Andrews) — A New British Order: Hogarth’s Design for a Domestic Column Capital
• Catherine Roach (Associate Professor of Art History, Virginia Commonwealth University) — ‘Purely English’: Hogarth, Nation, and Empire in the Early Nineteenth Century
12.00 Breakout Session
2.00 Panel 4 | Social and Political Critique
Moderator: Miya Tokumitsu (Donald T. Fallati and Ruth E. Pachman Curator of the Davison Art Collections)
• Meredith Gamer (Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University) — Hogarth’s Children
• Andrew Rudd (Director of Studies at Anglo Educational Services in London) — Hogarth, Walpole, and London’s Children’s Charities
• Phil Withington (Professor of Social and Cultural History, University of Sheffield) — Hogarth, Addiction, and Political Economy in Early Modern London
3.45 Breakout Session
Williamsburg Historical Dress Symposium | Well Suited
From Colonial Williamsburg:
Symposium on Historical Dress | Well Suited: The Work of the Tailor, 1640–1840
Online and in-person, Colonial Williamsburg, 5–7 November 2026
In-person registration due by 16 October; virtual registration due by 7 November
The 2026 symposium, Well Suited, examines the tailor’s trade, convening an international group of historians, curators, tailors, makers, designers, and scholars to explore the history, craft, and cultural significance of tailoring from the eighteenth through nineteenth centuries. Presentations examine military dress, enslaved and working-class clothing, women in the tailoring trade, international fashion exchange, reconstruction methods, and the technical practices of historical garment making, alongside broader themes of identity, labor, and colonialism.
Keynote presentations by Mark Hutter (Master Tailor, Colonial Williamsburg) and Tom Mahon (Tailor and Head Cutter, Redmayne) offer reflections on the evolution of tailor traditions and the enduring role of the tailor’s craft.
Military and martial dress emerge as a major theme throughout the program. Steve Baule examines the role of military tailors in British regiments in colonial America, while Matthew Keagle explores evidence of tailoring practices embedded in eighteenth-century military clothing. Tim Logue traces the influence of Central European Hajduk, Pandour, and Hussar dress on fashionable menswear, and Zack Pinsent investigates the origins, symbolism, reconstruction, and rediscovery of the Windsor Uniform. International and diplomatic wardrobes are further explored by Timothy Long and Gabriella de la Rosa in a new study of George Washington’s black velvet jacket at Sulgrave Manor.
Several presentations examine tailoring within systems of labor, enslavement, and colonial exchange. James J. Broomall considers the relationship between ready-made clothing and slavery in “The Fabric of Enslavement,” while Kathrin Breitt Brown studies garments produced for enslaved workers at Mount Vernon. Laura Beltrán-Rubio reimagines the colonial Andean tailoring trade through Indigenous research methods, and Michael Weil explores tailoring along the Spanish frontier in colonial Texas. Together, these lectures illuminate tailoring’s role within global systems of trade, empire, and labor.
The symposium also highlights tailoring as a deeply personal and local craft shaped by records, surviving garments, and workshop practice. Kirsten Hammerstrom analyzes a Philadelphia tailor’s ledger from 1763 to 1773 to reveal patterns of alteration, repair, and identity formation, while Henry Cooke uses the William Waine papers to reconstruct working-class clothing production and commercial life in colonial Boston. Brenda Rosseau traces three generations of the Figgatt tailoring family across Maryland and Virginia, and Michael Ramsey examines the overlooked business of making Scottish plaiding hose.
Technical reconstruction and experimental making form another important focus of the symposium. Rowan Brenzie reconstructs an 1820s men’s coat to study period drafting systems and fashionable silhouette, while Wilson LeCount and Emma Cross present new research into the construction of leather breeches. Kristen E. Stewart investigates John Randolph’s buckskin breeches, and Margaret Perry with E. Katherine Hargrove reconstruct mid-eighteenth-century orthopedic stays through experimental archaeology and embodied practice.
Questions of gender, fashion communication, and women’s participation in tailoring are addressed in several talks. Chloe Chapin examines nineteenth-century tailor’s plates as tools for advertising and codifying masculinity, while Hannah Rumball-Croft explores tact, touch, and propriety in relationships between male tailors and female clients. Karin J. Bohleke and Nicholas Sekela revisit the career and influence of nineteenth-century tailoress Amanda Jones, whose innovative drafting systems challenged assumptions about women’s labor and authorship within the trade.
Together, these presentations demonstrate the richness of tailoring history as a field that bridges material culture, social history, technical skill, and embodied practice, offering new perspectives on the makers, wearers, and meanings of clothing across the Atlantic world and beyond.
Conference | New Republic, New Worlds
From Colonial Williamsburg:
New Republic, New Worlds
Fifth and final meeting of the ‘For 2026’ Project
Williamsburg, 23–24 October 2026
Hosted by The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, and William & Mary
The American Revolution forged a new nation out of thirteen British colonies, triggering a host of predictable and unexpected consequences. This conference will explore the novel circumstances, challenges, and opportunities of the transitional era that followed victory in the War for American Independence. What were the fresh constitutional and political structures fueled by the Revolution, and what were the possibilities in play then and after? How were families, communities, boundaries, and environments changed in the new era? What were the ambitions of this new nation, and what do we now know about how diverse communities assessed its prospects? How did the various peoples within its borders and beyond respond to this new moment?
New Republic, New Worlds, the final meeting of the five-year For 2026 project, brings into conversation scholarly and public-facing research exploring the far-reaching effects of the American Revolution. It will take place October 23–24, 2026, at the William & Mary School of Education and at Colonial Williamsburg in Williamsburg, Virginia. Daytime programs will take place on the campus of William & Mary and throughout the Historic Area of Colonial Williamsburg, with two evening plenaries open to the public with no pre-registration required. Full conference registration information will be available by September.
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The Friday and Saturday evening plenaries are free and open to the public. Seating will be available on a first-come, first-served basis, and the recorded programs will be available online on both William & Mary and Colonial Williamsburg supported pages following the event.
Ronald Johnson | Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and
Atlantic Diplomacy during the American Revolution
Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg, 23 October 2026, 5pm (doors open at 4:30)
Dr. Ronald Angelo Johnson is the 2026–2027 Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American Antiquarian Society and the Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Professor of History at Baylor University. He is the author two books: Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy during the American Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2025) and Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance (UGA Press, 2014). He co-edited the volume In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (UGA Press, 2021). His current book manuscript We Are All Equal: Turmoil and Triumph in the Early United States and Revolutionary Haiti is under contract with Princeton University Press.
Kathleen DuVal | The American Revolution and the Survival of Native Nations
Muscarelle Museum of Art, Williamsburg, 24 October 2026, 5pm (doors open at 4:30)
The American Revolution brought unprecedented challenges to Indigenous lives, land, and sovereignty in North America. Yet we can also tell the past 250 years of Native history as the story of surviving the creation of the United States. Focusing on Native history can help us put the American Revolution in the longer context of North America’s long past, present, and future.
Dr. Kathleen DuVal is the Carl W. Ernst Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and the author of Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the Cundill History Prize. Her other books include Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent, and the U.S. history textbook Give Me Liberty!, co-authored with Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr. DuVal has published in the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Early Republic, The Atlantic, Time Magazine, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. She also appeared in the recent Ken Burns film, The American Revolution.
Conference | America 250: Dinners of Diplomacy
This October at Knowlsley Hall, with tickets available here:
Dinners of Diplomacy: Dialogue, Not Division
Online and in-person, Knowsley Hall, 29–30 October 2026
Celebrate America 250 with us at Knowsley Hall. Join us for a fascinating exploration into newly discovered details that led to American Independence and the legacy of Yorktown, hosted by The Countess of Derby. This two-day conference promises exciting new insights from a line-up of exceptional speakers. Your hostess, The Countess of Derby, is uniquely placed to bring this experience to life. As a direct descendant of British General Lord Cornwallis, speaking from Knowsley Hall—the historic seat of the Earls and Countesses of Derby—she will share her unique family links to the American Revolutionary War. The program features experts from across Great Britain, the United States, and France. In-person tickets will also include a guided tour of Knowsley Hall, a buffet lunch and refreshments throughout the day.
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Countess of Derby — Welcome
Stephen Conway — The British and American Revolution
Andrew O’Shaughnessy — British Leadership and the American War / Empire
Dan Robinson — European Ideas and the American Revolution
Patrick Griffin — General Lord Cornwallis
Larrie Ferreiro — Spanish Strategy, Financing, and Diplomacy in the War
Friederike Baer — German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War
Laurent Dubois — Haiti, Native Nations, and the Atlantic Revolutions
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Countess of Derby — Welcome
Douglas Bradburn — George Washington and Command Culture
Scott Stephenson — Commemorations and Washington’s Tent
David Armitage — An ‘Impudent, False and Atrocious Proclamation’?: British Responses to the Declaration of Independence in 1776
Iris de Rode — The Franco-American Alliance and the Post-Yorktown Dinners
Lady Derby — History Rhymes: Family Reflections (Burgoyne and Cornwallis)
Conference | Painting and Genre
From ArtHist.net and St Edmund Hall:
Painting and Genre
St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, 6 August 2026
Organized by Sofya Dmitrieva
Painting genres structure artistic practice, shape reception, and inform institutional frameworks. Yet as an analytical category, genre has long occupied a marginal position within art history.
This is not to suggest that the discipline has produced no genre theory. Influential studies, such as Wayne Franits’s Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution (Yale University Press, 2004), have addressed genre explicitly, and scholarship on individual genres, particularly portraiture and landscape, is vast. Questions related to genre, most notably the academic hierarchy of genres, have received sustained scholarly attention, from Jean Locquin to Christian Michel, Mark Ledbury, and Paul Duro. Indeed, one of the discipline’s foundational texts—Alois Riegl’s The Group Portraiture of Holland (1902)—is a genre study.
Art-historical approaches to genre have likewise been varied and innovative. To cite just a small selection of recent examples, Amy Freund has examined the hunting portrait from a sociohistorical perspective, linking it to the changing status of the sword nobility in the early eighteenth century (Art History, 2019); Susanna Caviglia has revisited history painting under Louis XV, relating it to contemporary political and cultural discourses on pleasure (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2020); and Stephanie O’Rourke has explored how late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century landscape painting registered practices of resource extraction (University of Chicago Press, 2025).
Still, despite this substantial body of scholarship, the study of genre has remained largely overshadowed by iconographic and formalist approaches. In contrast to literary and film studies, where genre theory occupies a central methodological position, art history has yet to develop a comparably sustained theoretical framework for the analysis of genre.
This one-day conference brings together contributions that place genre at the centre of the analysis of painting. It seeks to foreground genre not merely as a classificatory device but as a critical category through which artistic production, reception, and historiography can be re-examined. Attendance is free of charge, and no registration is required. A light lunch and refreshments will be provided.
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13.45 Welcome and introduction by Sofya Dmitrieva
14.00 Panel 1 | Definitions
• Emma Barker (The Open University) — Defining Genre Painting
• Miles Fletcher (University of Cambridge) — Een Algemeen Schilder: Landscape, Technology, and the History of Depiction in England and the Low Countries, 1649–1702
15.00 Panel 2 | Institutions
• Anastasia Skoybedo (University of Cambridge) — Landscape Painting within the Soviet Hierarchy of Genres: The Case of the Leningrad Landscape School
• Alyse Muller (Columbia University) — The Genealogy of the Marine Genre in France
16.00 Coffee Break
17.00 Panel 3 | Taste
• Daniel Sobrino Ralston (National Gallery) — The Rise and Fall of a Genre in Second Empire Paris
• Vittoria Cervini (Royal Collection Trust) — From Carlton House to Buckingham Palace: Seventeenth-Century Genre Paintings in George IV’s Collection
18.00 Panel 4 | Reimaginings
• Tom Zille (Mucha Foundation) — Queering the Conversation Piece
• Sarah Hegenbart (Heidelberg University) — Towards Transcultural Pictorial Genres
Conference | Sculpture and Trompe l’œil in European Ceramics
From the conference programme:
Sculpture and Trompe l’œil in European Ceramics:
From Bernard Palissy to the Present Day
Second Edition of the Annual Conference on European Sculpture and Decorative Arts
Online, 12–13 July 2026
A combined effort of the Centre de Recherches Historiques sur les Maîtres Ébénistes and the Low Countries Sculpture Society, whose libraries and archives have merged and are housed in the Hôtel de la Roche (1750) at Mons, the Annual International Conference had its inaugural edition in July 2025. This edition, dedicated to European ceramics, aims to address issues relating to figurative sculpture in the round, to relief sculpture and to trompe l’oeil, all in the medium of ceramics. This includes the imitation of other materials, such as wood or precious stones, and the mimetic representation of animals and plants. Sculpture and trompe l’oeil are recurring themes but have been little studied in a comprehensive manner in European ceramic art, not even in Art Deco ceramics, which frequently use sculptural forms, both in tableware and in purely decorative pieces.
The term trompe l’oeil comes from the world of easel painting, and the conference will be an opportunity to define more precisely the use and usefulness of this term in the world of ceramics. Our conference proposes to study cases that can shed light on this practice, from the Renaissance to the present day, in terms of the rendering of forms, colours and textures. These cases may concern the production, consumption, collecting and display of these types of ceramics throughout Europe and North America, from the Renaissance to the present day. Issues of design history, collaborations between creators and producers, artists and artisans, as well as the relations with any other people involved in the production of these ceramics may be studied. The theme will draw, in particular but not exclusively, on the rich tradition of ceramics in the Low Countries, from Antwerp majolica, via Tournai porcelain and Bouffioulx stoneware, to contemporary productions.
The conference will take place without audience (apart from the speakers, moderators and a few benefactors), but it will be filmed and broadcast live on YouTube for free, on our dedicated channel, The Low Countries Sculpture Society. The conference proceedings will be published in 2027 in a new academic journal dedicated to European sculpture and decorative arts, based on our annual international conferences.
Scientific Committee
Jean-Dominique Augarde, Centre de Recherches Historiques sur les Maîtres Ebénistes, Paris / Mons
Yves De Leeuw, collector and exhibition curator
Bernard Dragesco, Dragesco-Cramoisan Gallery, Paris / Château de Barly
Errol Manners, historic ceramics specialist, London
Sylvie Millasseau-Wengraf, art historian, Switzerland
Tamara Préaud, formerly Cité de la Céramique, Sèvres, and president, The French Porcelain Society, London
Miriam E. Schefzyk, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Volker Seiberth, University of Heidelberg / The Low Countries Sculpture Society
Pier Terwen, art historian and conservator of sculpture and ceramics, Leiden
Organising Committee
Katia Berseneva, Ecole du Louvre, Paris / The Low Countries Sculpture Society
Guillaume Hambye, notary, Mons
Laurence Lenne, Galerie Art & Patrimoine, Ath
Léon Lock, The Low Countries Sculpture Society, Brussels / Mons
Grégory Maugé, Centre de Recherches Historiques sur les Maîtres Ébénistes, Paris / Mons
Thierry Naveaux, The Low Countries Sculpture Society, Brussels / Mons
Sébastien Tercelin de Joigny, Tercelin de Joigny Gallery, Mons / Seneffe
Jenny Tondreau, Collegiate church of Sainte-Waudru, Mons
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9.30 Léon Lock (The Low Countries Sculpture Society) — Introduction
10.05 Keynote Lecture
• Patricia Ferguson (London) — Artifice and Spectacle: the Conceit of a Lettuce as Large as Life for the European Table in the Mid-18th Century
11.00 Break
11.30 Session 1 | Trompe l’œil and Mimesis I
Moderator: Errol Manners
• Melody Hsu (McGill University, Montreal) — Book Flask: Trompe l’Œil and Deception in Early Modern Europe
• Mariette Boudgourd (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris) —Jardinières bûches, verres paysages et cendriers poissons. De nouvelles formes de la nature « genre Palissy » au XIXe siècle en France
12.45 Lunch break
14.00 Session 2 | Trompe l’œil and Mimesis, II
Moderator: Volker Seiberth
• Nadia Mariana Consiglieri, Universidad de Buenos Aires — Reptiles, amphibians and trompe l’œil in a Bernard Palissy ceramic piece from the Museum of Decorative Arts in Buenos Aires
• Carina-Nathalia Madonna Visconti-Paff (Sapienza Università di Roma) — The Illusion of Lustre: Trompe l’œil in Hungarian Zsolnay Ceramics, Eosin Imitations of Metals and Nature in the Art Nouveau Style
15.15 Break
15.45 Session 3 | The Sculptor and the Sculptural in Ceramics
Moderator: Bernard Dragesco
• Jean-Dominique Augarde (Centre de Recherches Historiques sur les Maîtres Ebénistes, Paris/Mons) — Piat Joseph Sauvage et le Salon de 1798
16.20 Keynote Lecture
• Errol Manners (historic ceramics specialist, London) — Louis-François Roubiliac and Chelsea Porcelain: A Reassessment
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9.30 Session 4 | Manufactures, Workshops, and Sculptors in Ceramics
Moderator: Sylvie Millasseau-Wengraf
• Valérie Montens (Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, Brussels) and
Elise Urbain Ruano (Domaine & Musée royal de Mariemont) — Entre virtuosité technique et langage décoratif : la sculpture en porcelaine à la manufacture d’Ixelles de 1830 à 1953
• Carys Wilkins et Claire Blakey (National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh) — European Ceramic Sculpture Rediscovered at National Museums Scotland
• Grégory Maugé (Centre de Recherches Historiques sur les Maîtres Ébénistes, Paris / Mons) and Léon Lock (The Low Countries Sculpture Society, Brussels / Mons) — La sculpture en céramique en Hainaut au XXe siècle
Conference | 2026 Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife
From Historic Deerfield:
Futurecasting, Futurekeeping: New Englanders Imagine Worlds to Come
2026 Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife
Online and in-person, Historic Deerfield, Deerfield, Massachusetts, 26–27 June 2026
In-person registration closes June 22 at noon. Virtual registration will stay open through the event. All registrants receive access to recordings of the event for one month.
In 2026, the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife will mark its 50th anniversary by looking both backwards and ahead. As this year’s seminar looks forward to its own future, we will contemplate ways residents of the region (broadly construed) have envisioned, foretold, and worked to shape various futures over the region’s long history. Events will include reflection on, and celebration of, the Seminar’s fifty years as a source of scholarship and publication on the everyday life, work, and culture of New England’s past.
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Ruthy Rogers (1778–1812), Needlework Picture, Marblehead, Massachusetts, ca. 1789, silk on linen, 27 × 23 cm (New York: American Folk Art Museum, gift of Ralph Esmerian, 2005.8.53).
10.00 Optional Morning Activity
Tours at Bellamy House and remarks from the Director, Chicopee Falls, MA (Pre-registration is required: $12 per person)
12.00 Registration opens at Historic Deerfield
1.20 Virtual sign-in opens for online attendees
1.30 Welcome — Marla Miller (Distinguished Professor of History, UMass Amherst, and President, Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife)
1.45 Panel 1 | Planned Communities
Moderator: Christian Goodwillie (Director and Curator of Special Collections, Hamilton College, Burke Library)
• Carl Guarneri (Professor Emeritus of History, Saint Mary’s College of California, and Research Scholar, Colgate University) — Brook Farm: Boston ‘Combined Households’, and the Utopian Origins of Urban Communal Housing, 1846–1851
• CJ Martin (Visiting Assistant Professor, College of the Holy Cross) — Black Millerites
• Diana Lempel (Scholar/Practitioner of Folk History) — The Blessing of the Attic: Cambridge Co-operative Housekeeping Society and Family Memory Keeping
3.15 Break with refreshments
3.30 Tribute to Founders
3:45 Futurecasting: A Roundtable on the Past, Present, and Future of New England Studies
Sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Public History Program and Historic Northampton
Moderator: J. Ritchie Garrison (Professor Emeritus, Department of History, University of Delaware)
• Emelie Gevalt (Deputy Director and Chief Curatorial and Program Officer, American Folk Art Museum)
• Thomas Guiler (Director of Museum Affairs, Oneida Community Mansion House)
• Philippe Halbert (Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)
5.00 Reception
Sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society and the Boston University Program in American Studies
Join us for a celebratory reception marking the 50th anniversary of the Dublin Seminar. Enjoy heavy hors d’oeuvres and assorted beverages in the company of the Dublin Seminar membership and your colleagues for this festive occasion. (Pre-registration is $25)
7.00 Keynote Address
• Holly Jackson (Chair of American Studies and Professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Boston) — The Ends of the World in Antebellum New England
s a t u r d a y , 2 7 j u n e
8.30 Deerfield Community Center opens. In-person attendees may pick up name badges and information packets.
8:50 Virtual sign-in for online attendees
9.00 Panel 2 | Imagined Futures in Literature
Moderator: Barbara Matthews (Independent Historical Consultant)
• Megan Pickett (The Winchendon School) — ‘Where to Go Next’: Utopian Immediacy in Total Loss Farm
• Ella Koston (PhD student at Boston University’s American Studies Program) — Afrofuturist Vision: Pauline Hopkins
10.30 Break
10.45 Panel 3 | Imagined Futures in Material Culture
Moderator: Erika Gasser (Director of Academic Programs, Historic Deerfield)
• Elizabeth Eager (Assistant Professor, Southern Methodist University) — Futurity Imagined through Women’s Needlework
• Victoria Kenyon (Curatorial Track doctoral candidate, Art History, University of Delaware) — Magical Flowers: Fortune-Telling Objects from New England
• Brece Honeycutt (Independent Scholar/Multimedia Artist) — Building Harmony / Constructing Color
12.15 Lunch (buffet provided at the Deerfield Inn)
1.45 Panel 4 | Limits of Progressivism: Sexual Politics
Moderator: Erica Lome (Curator of Collections, Historic New England)
• Hunter Moskowitz (Researcher at American Ancestors, Boston) — Factory as Utopia: Imaginations of Sexuality in Early Lowell
• Catherine Terelak (Interpreter at Historic New England’s Beauport, the Sleeper-McCann House) — An Intentional Community: Gloucester’s Dabsville
• Stephen Paterwic (Trustee of the Shaker Library and Museum, Sabbathday Lake, Maine) — Shakers and the Second Gathering
3.15 Break
3.30 Panel 5 | Forecasting Future Ecologies
Moderator: Nan Wolverton (Vice President for Academic and Public Programs, American Antiquarian Society)
• Meghan Freeman (Fellowship and Internship Program Director, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University) — Bird Day, Now and Forever: Mabel Osgood Wright and the Future of New England Bird-Life
• Li-hsin Hsu (Professor of English, National Chengchi University, Taiwan) — Silk Culture, Utopian Experiment, and Anthropocene Imagination in Mid-19th-Century New England
• Dan McKanan (Emerson Senior Lecturer, Harvard Divinity School) — Imagining the Future Forest
5.00 Closing Remarks — John Davis (President, Historic Deerfield, Inc)
Conference | Theatricality and Garden Art
From ArtHist.net:
Theatralität und Gartenkunst: Vom 17. bis ins frühe 19. Jahrhundert
Weimar, 25–27 June 2026
Internationale und interdisziplinäre Tagung vom 25. bis 27. Juni 2026 im Vortragssaal des Goethe- und Schiller-Archivs und Festsaal des Goethe-Nationalmuseums, Weimar
Veranstaltungen im Rahmen der Tagung
• Goethes und Schröters Die Fischerin. Eine Promenade in Tiefurt, 26. Juni 2026, 16 Uhr (Park Tiefurt bei Weimar)
• Konzert: Kammermusik aus der Epoche der Empfindsamkeit, am Freitag 26. Juni 2026, 19.30 Uhr, Festsaal im Goethe-Nationalmuseum in Weimar
In Kooperation mit der Klassik Stiftung Weimar und der Goethe-Gesellschaft Weimar. Gefördert durch Daimler und Benz-Stiftung und DFG
Organisation und Kontakt
Anna Axtner-Borsutzky, a.axtner-borsutzky@lmu.de
Helena Langewitz, helena.langewitz@uni-mainz.de
d o n n e r s t a g , 2 5 j u n i
13.30 Anna Axtner-Borsutzky und Helena Langewitz — Begrüßung
13.45 Gartenanlagen von Versailles bis Wörlitz
Moderation: Astrid Dröse und Anna Axtner-Borsutzky
• Stefan Schweizer (Düsseldorf) — Zur Praxis des Wassertheaters. Von der Villa Aldobrandini über das Wassertheater in Versailles bis zur Wilhelmshöhe in Kassel
• Hendrik Ziegler (Marburg) — Versailles in Wörlitz. Barocke Theatralität im Garten der Aufklärung
• Natalie Gutgesell (Lichtenfels/Berlin) — Zum Luisenkloster in Weimar
16.30 Franziska Rieland (Klassik Stiftung) — Der Tiefurter und der Herzogliche Park in Weimar: schöner Effekt, dichterische Vision und inszenierte Natur — Mit Führung im Ilmpark
f r e i t a g , 2 6 j u n i
9.30 Gartenanlagen von Weimar und Umgebung
Moderation: Helena Langewitz und Klaus Pietschmann
• Anna Axtner-Borsutzky (München) — Kulissen aus Kisten und Worten. Gartentheorie und -praxis auf der Bühne um 1800
• Anna Ananieva (Weimar) — Gartenräume als Spielräume. August von Kotzebue und die Theatralität des Gartens um 1800
• Antonia Weiss (Amsterdam) — The Right to Look: Gender in the Visual Regime of Berlin‘s Tiergarten, 1740–1830
• Jana Kittelmann (Dessau-Wörlitz) — Vulkane, Venus, Warnaltar. Zur Inszenierung von Natur und Kunst in den Wörlitzer Anlagen
13.00 Mittagspause und tagungsinterner Transfer nach Tiefurt
15.00 Angelika Schneider (Klassik Stiftung Weimar) — Führung in Tiefurt
16.00 Promenade mit Goethes und Corona Schroeters Die Fischerin im Park
19.30 Musikalische Abendveranstaltung im Goethe-Nationalmuseum
Moderation: Helena Langewitz und Anna Axtner-Borsutzky
• „Gewitternacht“ — Konzert mit Gunta Smirnova (Gesang) und Mikayel Balyan (Klavier)
s a m s t a g , 2 7 j u n i
9.30 Musik, Theater, Virtual Reality
Moderation: Sunna Kroy und Amelie Fenske
• Joachim Kremer (Stuttgart) — Außerhalb des Protokolls? Garten und Natur bei Hasse, Paisiello und Haydn
• Helena Langewitz (Mainz) — Deutsche Gärten auf der Opernbühne? Zur Konstruktion national konnotierter Gartenszenen in Günther von Schwarzburg (1776) und Rosamunde (1780)
• Esma Cerkovnik (Zürich) — Gärten der Täuschung. Zur Gartenszenerie in der Musik um 1800
• Alisa Winkens (Stuttgart) — Schauplatz Gartentheater. Molières Bühne für La Princesse d‘Élide (1664) in Versailles und in Virtual Reality
• Leonie Matt (Mainz) — Zwischen Théâtre d‘eau, Théâtre de fleurs und Théâtre pour jouer la Comédie. Theatrale Gartenschauplätze in der Gartentheorie des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts
• Hartmut Troll (Bundesgärten AT) — Theatrum terrae. Aspekte der Gartenkunst der Aufklärung am Beispiel der Schlossgärten Schwetzingen und Schönbrunn
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